round-robin

round robin

noun
1.
a sequence or series.
2.
a petition, remonstrance, or the like, having the signatures arranged in circular form so as to disguise the order of signing.
3.
a letter, notice, or the like, circulated from person to person in a group, often with individual comments being added by each.
4.
Sports. a tournament in which all of the entrants play each other at least once, failure to win a contest not resulting in elimination.
Also, round-rob·in.

Origin:
1540–50

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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00:10
Round-robin is always a great word to know.
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
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Collins
World English Dictionary
round robin
 
—n
1.  a letter, esp a petition or protest, having the signatures in a circle in order to disguise the order of signing
2.  any letter or petition signed by a number of people
3.  (US), (Canadian) a tournament, as in a competitive game or sport, in which each player plays against every other player

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline
Word Origin & History

round robin
"petition or complaint signed in a circle to disguise the order in which names were affixed and prevent ringleaders from being identified," 1730, originally in ref. to sailors and frequently identified as a nautical term. As a kind of tournament in which each player plays the others, it is recorded from
1895.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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FOLDOC
Computing Dictionary

round-robin definition

algorithm
A scheduling algorithm in which processes are activated in a fixed cyclic order. Those which cannot proceed because they are waiting for some event (e.g. termination of a child process or an input/output operation) simply return control to the scheduler. The virtue of round-robin scheduling is its simplicity - only the processes themselves need to know what they are waiting for or how to tell if it has happened. However, if a process goes back to sleep just before the event for which it is waiting occurs then the event will not get handled until all the other processes have been activated.
Compare priority scheduling.
(1996-02-10)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © Denis Howe 2010 http://foldoc.org
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